The game, Gwern writes, just “pretends to be made out of things like ‘walls’ and ‘speed limits’ and ‘levels which must be completed in a particular order.’” But what it actually is, at a deeper level, is bits, code, memory locations, processing units, and so on and so forth.
Most systems can be viewed at multiple levels. There is a superficial system which pretends to be made of one thing (walls, hens). But actually, it is really made of something else (bits, memory allocations). And if you learn to understand that underlying system, you can find ways to use the lower-level details to steer the system in a way that looks incomprehensible to those who only see the more superficial system.
Companies and governments like to pretend to be formal, machine-like systems, where things have to be done in a specific way. But this, just as in the case of the video game pretending to be made of levels, is an abstraction. A fiction. Actually, a bureaucracy is just people and some file systems. Calling and asking to speak to a supervisor, or showing up in person, or finding the specific person who handles your case, often lets you bypass the “system.”
Part of what makes a person creative is his lack of emphasis on things technical. […] [I]f you are someone who is already creative, and then you become technical, then you are unstoppable.